Penguin Random House India recently announced that internationally renowned and Booker Prize-winner Salman Rushdie is coming up with a new book, his first new fiction since Victory City. The Eleventh Hour is a moving, masterful collection of stories that transport us around the world from Bombay neighborhoods to elite English universities. The book is slated for a global release on 4 November 2025 and will be published under the Hamish Hamilton imprint in India. All rights were acquired from Andrew Wylie at The Wylie Agency.
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighborhood of Midnight’s Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English college, an undead academic can’t rest until he exacts vengeance upon his former tormentor.
Following Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie’s new fiction moves between the places he has grown up in, inhabited, explored, and left. In doing so, he asks fundamental questions we all one day face. How does one deal with, accommodate, or rail against entering the eleventh hour, the final stage of your life? How can you bid farewell to the places you have made home?
Salman Rushdie says, ‘The three novellas in this volume, all written in the last twelve months, explore themes and places that have been much on my mind – mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America. And Goya and Kafka and Bosch as well. I’m happy that the stories, very different from one another in setting, story and technique, nevertheless manage to be in conversation with one another, and with the two stories that serve as prologue and epilogue to this threesome. I have come to think of the quintet as a single work, and I hope readers may see and enjoy it in the same way.’
Milee Ashwarya, publisher & SVP- Adult Publishing Group, Penguin Random House India, says, “The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie is his latest fiction after the global bestseller Knife. The stories and the settings in the book take us back to the themes and places that have shaped Rushdie’s writing and continue to be relevant today. I am delighted to publish The Eleventh Hour in India, and hope it is loved by readers in the subcontinent.
Salman Rushdie is the author of sixteen novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Quichotte (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize). A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen’s last Birthday Honours list in 2022.
